Gun Guys

by Dan Baum

  Money wasn’t a problem. Robert and his brother sat at the face-to-face desks their father and grandfather had used and grew a big business into a gigantic one. They diluted their shares to raise capital, packaged meat for Costco under the Kirkland label, expanded into deli meats and precooked dinners, and became the meat supplier for the McDonald’s Steak, Egg & Cheese Bagel.

  With bigger money, though, came bigger headaches. The science of looking for E. coli had gotten better since Robert and Justin had taken over, and the harder the government inspectors looked, the more they found. One week, the grinding line was closed; the next week, the killing floor. One government inspector would tell the plant to do one thing; another, the opposite.

  Robert and Justin built a million-dollar laboratory to do their own testing and stay ahead of government scientists, but it wasn’t only the scientists they had to watch; it was also regulators, who seemed to come up with a new requirement every fifteen minutes, and lawyers. The business never had a serious E. coli violation, thank heaven, but you never knew when it might come. Even a small violation could cost a fortune, exposing the company to the caprice of FDA inspectors or the mercy of plaintiff’s attorneys.

  The ATF, with its persnickety rules about machine guns, seemed to Robert a lot like the FDA; between the hobby and the business, he had no peace. There came a day, late in the Clinton years, when Robert and Justin looked at each other across the pushed-together desks and asked, “Who needs this?”

  Justin was fifty, Robert getting close. They had all the money they would ever need. To continue the business would mean expanding yet again—there is no standing still in American industry—and that would mean starting all over: diluting shares and selling stock to raise capital, inventing new products, and finding new customers.

  If any of their children had wanted to take over, Robert and Justin might have gone forward. But none did. So in August 2001—a month before the attacks of 9/11—they sold to Cargill the business their grandfather had built from nothing, and walked away loaded.

  Retirement afforded Robert the time to ferret out artifacts of machine-gun culture—antique lead-soldier machine gunners, machine-gun-unit insignia, memoirs of machine gunners, machine-gun beer steins, one-sixth-scale working models of historic machine guns—and to fill the lacunae in his gun collection. He began writing technical articles on historical machine guns for one of the more scholarly firearms magazines. He became a well-known elder in the community of machine-gun enthusiasts, a gentleman collector, and a generous source of technological and historical information. He traveled each year to the big machine-gun shoots to see who had what on the firing line, reconnect with old friends, and perhaps find something new for his collection.

  In the spring of 2010, he flew to Las Vegas, rented a car, and drove three hours south to Wikieup, Arizona, to one of his favorite shoots. There, amid the racketing gunfire, he met a stoop-shouldered middle-aged man in pleated pants and glasses, looking ridiculous in an NRA cap.

  We stood atop a bulldozer-flattened ridge, in front of which spread a dry swale about half a mile wide, with a line of low hills rising beyond it—a perfect place to shoot. The hills beyond the swale made a backstop, and we were miles from the nearest house. As the sun came up, men in hoodies and camo pants were setting up a firing line on the flattened ridge, unpacking tools and ammunition boxes, rubbing their hands against the chill, talking in the kind of easygoing, jargon-heavy language you’d hear beside a NASCAR track. Dozens of machine guns stood on bipods and tripods or in racks, under makeshift sunshades made of blue tarp. We could have turned back the Wehrmacht.

  Down in the swale, people moved about, erecting targets of various kinds: steel drums, junked cars, and dozens of odd-looking wooden stakes with orange tips, like enormous strike-anywhere matches.

  Robert—with dashing black eyebrows, animated eyes, and a rakish smile—was holding forth on the technical problems of the nineteenth century. “The first machine guns were black powder; you can imagine the cloud of smoke they made,” he said, dragging on a cigarette. He was short, so in his crisp insignia-covered leather jacket he looked like a ten-year-old boy playing fighter pilot. “What you needed was powerful, uniform, well-fitting cartridges to make the machine gun really work. It was the imprecision of cartridges that held back their early development.” He’d have gone on, but an old friend, “Doc,” called him over to help iron out a Vickers-gun problem.

  An aroma of coffee drew me to a trailer manned by the Kingman, Arizona, 4-H club; since I’d last looked, the Department of Agriculture had broadened its mission of agrarian youth empowerment to include waiting on machine gunners. I bought a breakfast burrito and a cup of hot, coffee-flavored water from high schoolers who were suspiciously cheerful, given that the sun was barely up.

  I’m not sure what I expected from the machine-gun crowd. But as I took a place at a picnic table with some gloriously unshaven shooters, I found myself in a history colloquium, a round-robin of martial arcana. Slurping up my burrito, I learned that the Viennese captain Baron Adolph von Odkolek had sold Hotchkiss its machine-gun design in 1893, but of course it was Laurence Benet who came up with the gun’s signature heat-dispersing doughnut rings. Not until 1909, it turns out, did Argentina abandon the 7.65×53 Belgian round for the Maxim gun, replacing it with the 7.65×53 Spitzer—obviously for the flatter trajectory!

  Holding burritos in their solvent-stained hands, the men debated whether Vickers had improved on Maxim’s design when it bought the company in 1896, and whether the Blish lock was an advance or a dangerous step backward. Without so much as a pause, the conversation segued into machine guns seen in movies. The HBO series The Pacific had just begun, and everybody at the table agreed that its producers had gotten uniquely right the distinctive clink-clink-clink made by the reciprocating bolt of the Browning Model 1917A1 water-cooled machine gun.

  Most of my companions were in their fifties or older, many with gray ponytails hanging from beneath ball caps, and dressed like day laborers. Yet they talked like professors—or patent freaks—and, given the value of the guns on the firing line, no doubt earned like bond traders.

  A wizened man of about sixty in a Marine piss-cutter cap asked me to scoot over so he could sit down, and he brought the conversation down to where I could graze. “What you see in the World War One movies, machine guns mowing down rows of advancing soldiers? That’s not how it was,” he said. “The British called it the ‘wall of fire.’ What you did was, you shot your machine gun in the air so the bullets fell in a line in front of your own advancing soldiers. You shot over their heads, and the bullets came down in a curtain. The cone of fire was something else. You needed a forward observer for that. You done with this?”

  He crumpled up my burrito wrapper. “Here’s your machine gun,” he said, one hand on the wrapper. “Over here”—my paper coffee cup—“is the enemy, camped behind a hill where they think they’re safe.” He laid his forearm between the cup and the wrapper to represent the hill. “You fire over the hill and rain the bullets down on them. That’s how a machine gun should be used.”

  There’s an image for a sleepless night: bullets raining silently out of the sky, straight down, so that not even a foxhole is cover.

  I asked the men whether they minded paying the two-hundred-dollar federal tax. Wasn’t that kind of steep? They laughed.

  “I’ll tell you steep,” said a guy named Walter, who’d trekked to Arizona from Staten Island. “I got a 1917 Browning over there. I paid fifteen hundred for it back in the seventies. You wanted to buy that now, it’d be thirty grand. Thirty grand! And you’re talking a two-hundred-dollar tax stamp? Shit, my gun will eat up two hundred dollars’ worth of ammunition in thirty seconds. Two hundred dollars …”

  “Used to be, it was a barrier to ownership. The tax was more than the gun.”

  “Those days are over.”

  “Long gone.”

  “So if I wanted to get into this, what’s the cost of entry?” I aske
d. “What’s the least expensive machine gun I could buy?”

  “Sten gun,” three men said in unison, and gave each other weary high fives. The stamped-steel British submachine gun with which nine-year-old Robert had started his DEWAT collection had cost the British government about four dollars apiece during World War II; now, if you could find one, it would go for a thousand times that much. And that was the cheapest machine gun on the market.

  What had first jacked up the price was a piece of pet legislation from the National Rifle Association, the grandly named Firearms Owners’ Protection Act of 1986. The law, signed by Ronald Reagan, repealed a lot of what the NRA considered bothersome 1960s-era gun regulations. At the eleventh hour, though, someone slipped in an amendment that banned the sale to civilians of any machine gun registered with the ATF after May 19, 1986. Suddenly the number of legally tradable machine guns was fixed at about 186,000. But what made the price skyrocket, about seven years later, was the advent of the World Wide Web. Pretty soon, Web crawlers all over America were finding sites catering to the full-auto hobby and saying to themselves, “Holy shit! I can buy a machine gun!”

  “In the early days, it was working guys, guys interested in mechanical things,” said Walter from Staten Island. “They’d buy one for a few hundred bucks, shoot it awhile, sell it, and buy another. Back then—we’re talking the fifties and sixties—machine-gun people were the lower-class shooters, looked down on by the skeet shooters, the marksmen, the collectors. This is an era, remember, when skeet shooters wore neckties. We machine-gun guys were a little fraternity with dirt under our fingernails. Then, in the nineties”—he clapped his hands loudly—“prices go crazy. It becomes a yuppie thing. Now it’s the owner of the muffler shop instead of the guy working in the muffler shop, you hear me?” He leaned in close. “Me, no way I could buy that gun today.” He glanced over both shoulders. “More rich guys here than at the Kentucky Derby.”

  The men stood, threw their foil wrappings into blue plastic trash barrels, and made their way to the firing line. The people had cleared out of the swale, and the air was alive with the clickety-clack of guns being loaded and locked. Everybody clamped on hearing protectors. A Freon boat horn sounded, and all the guns opened up at once with a sound like the universe splitting in twain.

  Puffs of dust danced over the swale, green-and-red tracer bullets scratched the air, brass cartridges leapt in twinkling streams from smoking receivers. The oversize strike-anywhere matches turned out to be posts with sticks of dynamite strapped to them. Each time a bullet found one, it exploded with a sinus-popping boom and a house-size ball of sulfurous yellow smoke.

  Robert stood watching with his hands in the pockets of his leather flight jacket, grinning widely around a cigarette. “I love this shoot!” he yelled above the din. “Look how few spectators! It’s just for the shooters. It’s a gentlemen’s shoot!”

  “Are there other shoots?”

  “Lots! They’ve become popular as Republican fund-raisers! You going to shoot?”

  “I don’t have a machine gun!”

  He motioned me to follow him, and we strolled down the line to a blue-tarp booth with a hand-lettered sign: MACHINE GUN RENTALS. Listed on the board, like sandwiches at a deli, were guns available to rent. THOMPSON $25. PPSH $20. STEN $20. BAR $50. The prices listed were to fire a single magazine of ammunition. I stepped forward and told a young woman—one of the few women I’d seen all morning—that I wanted to shoot the Thompson. She took my money and motioned me forward to the lip of the swale.

  It was an inferno down there—tracers bouncing everywhere, junked cars aflame, dynamite bursting. The prairie dogs and lizards must have been wondering, What in the hell? A buff man in his sixties, his high fade looming like a granite cliff, stepped up beside me, clutching a Thompson submachine gun. He inserted a thirty-round magazine, pulled back the bolt, set the safety, and held it out to me.

  “Could you undo all that?”

  He cocked an eye suspiciously.

  “Could you take out the magazine and uncock it?” I shouted above the din.

  He frowned.

  “I want to do all that myself!” It was the feel of a gun I liked most—hefting the weight, working the mechanism. I’d been watching soldiers, cops, and gangsters manipulate tommy guns since before I could remember. I could have gone through those insouciant moves in my sleep. And here was my one chance to do it myself.

  The man shrugged and removed the magazine. He ejected the chambered round, pressed it back into the magazine, and put the gun in my arms.

  Holding it by its pistol grip, I fitted the magazine into the slot and slapped it home with the heel of my hand, like Sergeant Saunders on Combat! or Eliot Ness on The Untouchables. With my left hand, I grabbed the bolt on top of the gun and slicked it back. Clenching an imaginary stogie between my teeth, I raised the gun to my cheek.

  It kicked far less than I’d imagined. With the stock beating against my shoulder, I was able to direct a line of dust clouds across the desert floor and onto one of the orange sticks. Ka-boom!

  The gun clicked empty—twenty-five dollars gone in about four seconds. Robert was grinning enormously. “You get it now?” he asked with a laugh.

  I did. Choose the most adamant anti-gun peacenik you know and give him a tommy gun to shoot at a stick of dynamite. Then strap him to a polygraph and ask him if it was fun.

  Roger Sprava, one of the youngest shooters on the line, was hammering away with a tripod-mounted Browning Model 1919 belt-fed .30-caliber—a gun you practically needed a mortgage to buy—making a small mountain of empty brass shells. In a wooden rack behind him stood more guns, a collection that probably topped $100,000. I figured he was a trust-fund baby.

  “Rich? Me?” he said, when he took a break. He had short hair and a thin, boyish face, which he wrinkled up as he fanned smoke away from his gun’s hot breech. “I work for a semiconductor company in Phoenix. I just save up.” He’d bought his first machine gun in 1997. “All I wanted was an eight-hundred-dollar MAC-10, after that two-handed thing Arnold Schwarzenegger did in True Lies,” he said. But after that, one thing led to another. “I got an M16 next …” He gestured sheepishly toward the collection beside him: an M2 carbine, an Uzi with a silencer as big around as a whiskey bottle, and a Thompson. Their long steel barrels glinted in the intense Arizona sunlight. Sprava was glad he’d put his money into these instead of, say, mutual funds—an understandable sentiment in the recession-darkened spring of 2010. “I know these are always going up in value,” he said. “And you can’t take your mutual funds out on Saturday and play with them.” I asked what had attracted him to the guns. Their mechanical elegance? The story of their patents? The history of the battles in which they were used? “Naw,” he said. “They’re fun to shoot.” He figured he’d probably go through six thousand dollars’ worth of ammunition at the two-day event.

  The shoot lasted all day and into a blazing, tracer-streaked night. About once an hour, the guns fell silent so that range officers could replace and refresh targets and shooters could collect brass in big barrels for reloading. New guns kept showing up. A couple of guys spent an hour setting up a six-foot-long Soviet DShK 12.7-millimeter anti-aircraft machine gun that sucked everybody’s attention away from the ordinary Vickers and Brownings. When those guys finally started firing off a belt of cartridges the size of small flashlights, I could feel my clothing flutter.

  Reporters can be cynical, but in thirty years of encounters, I’d had plenty of moments to marvel at the freedom of information that Americans enjoy. I’d challenged powerful government officials in interviews without having to think about the consequences. I’d received packets of sensitive documents in the mail, not from thieves but openly, in response to Freedom of Information Act requests. I’d published accounts of official wrongdoing and expected only accolades (as opposed to a midnight interrogation and summary execution). Day to day, I’d taken it for granted. Every now and then, though—especially when working in Latin Amer
ica, Asia, and Africa, and even in Europe—I’d felt awe for the uniqueness of America’s compact with its citizens. The power we enjoyed to know implied an amazing amount of trust in the people. Go ahead, the system seemed to say, discover and denounce the most explosive misdeeds of your government. The republic can take it. The republic depends on it.

  I found myself thinking that way on the flattened mesa outside Wikieup, where ordinary Americans, some rich, some not so much, were playing with incredibly powerful weapons, blithely taking them out and blasting away on a sunny Saturday with no kind of official supervision. No other functioning country on earth trusted its people with such weapons. And the trust seemed well placed. An ATF official I’d met told me that, in the seven decades since licensing began, not a single licensed machine gun had been used in a violent crime. The people who got permits were thoroughly checked out, had thousands of dollars invested in their toys, and didn’t want to risk losing them.

  If you bought the argument that the private ownership of firearms demonstrated America’s exceptional trust in its citizens, then to be one of the people who owned and used firearms was to make that trust manifest. To do so with a machine gun—well, that was the ultimate.

  This was how the NRA and the firearms industry encouraged those of us who liked guns to think, at any rate. It was how they’d managed to raise an otherwise ordinary hobby to the exalted plane of patriotic duty.

  During the next break in the gunning, I found myself standing next to Roger Sprava in line for a cup of that watery 4-H coffee. His face flecked with powder residue, his hands streaked with angry red blisters from brushing against a red-hot barrel, he was one happy-looking man.